The whistle-blower who helped lead investigators to Rockwell International’s crimes at Rocky Flats got nothing Tuesday as the U.S. Supreme Court rejected his claim to part of a $4.2 million federal court award.

The high court’s ruling ended an 18-year legal battle but raised concerns that the court had removed the financial incentive for some potential whistle-blowers to come forward. Whistle-blower suits annually return about $3billion to the government.

The Rocky Flats whistle-blower, engineer James Stone, 83, of Wheat Ridge, was barely aware of the outcome of his case, said Randy Stone, 52, his son. The elder Stone checked into an Alz heimer’s treatment facility nine months ago.

The court’s ruling is “disappointing. This cost him so much professionally,” Randy Stone said. A share of the award from the civil lawsuit James Stone filed in 1989, which was later joined by the federal government, “would have shown that the government and the public appreciated what my dad did.”

Supreme Court justices ruled 6-2 against Stone’s effort to collect up to a third of the $4.2 million Rockwell was ordered to pay at the conclusion of the federal trial in 1999. The company still must pay the full penalty.

Before leaving Rockwell, Stone predicted that Rockwell’s waste-disposal efforts would fail because of faulty design. But the company discounted Stone’s warning and went forward, combining mildly radioactive sludge with concrete to form large blocks called “pondcrete.”

Stone proved to be correct: Some of the “pondcrete” blocks disintegrated and contaminated water and soil – though not for the reasons Stone suspected.

Since Stone had predicted, but didn’t witness, the failure, his report to the FBI, which helped lead to a raid of the plant, was not direct and independent knowledge of wrongdoing as required under the federal False Claims Act governing whistle- blower claims, Justice Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion said.

A dissent by Justice John Paul Stevens, joined by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, challenged Scalia’s interpretation of the False Claims Act, arguing that Stone led the government to the fraud.

For decades, Rockwell workers under contract to the U.S. Department of Energy made some 70,000 plutonium triggers at Rocky Flats, located in Jefferson County about 16 miles northwest of downtown Denver. Production stopped in 1989 amid safety problems.

Stone first went to the FBI with allegations of Rockwell’s crimes in March 1986 after he had left his job, court records show.

While the federal government investigated, Rockwell started making pondcrete against the advice in Stone’s memo. The company continued making it until at least 1988, when it reported some of the leakage to the Department of Energy.

FBI agents then raided the factory on June 6, 1989. An affidavit released three days later was based in part on information given by Stone.

Rockwell pleaded guilty in 1992 to violating five felony and five misdemeanor federal environmental laws related to allowing toxic waste to leak from containers and spraying toxic waste on plant grounds from 1987 to 1989. The company agreed to pay $18.5 million in fines. The federal government has recently declared the cleanup complete.

But the federal government wanted more, joini+ng Stone’s suit to seek reimbursement for cleanup costs and repayment of some performance-related bonuses that Rockwell had received even as the company failed to disclose the pondcrete problems and other issues.

Rockwell Automation, which assumed Rockwell International’s responsibility to pay the $4.2 million as Rockwell International became part of Boeing Co., welcomed the court’s ruling.

“We are very pleased with the victory, because this closes out something that has been going on for more than a decade,” Rockwell’s spokesman John Bernaden said from headquarters in Milwaukee.

Whistle-blower advocates fumed, saying Tuesday’s ruling will discourage lawsuits that often require years of work at huge expense.

The Supreme Court “has just stuck a big knife into whistle- blowers,” said James Moorman, president of Taxpayers Against Fraud, which guides whistle- blowers and attorneys.

“The risk has just increased dramatically. Fewer whistle- blowers are going to come forward to take action.”

Bruce Finley covers environment issues, the land air and water struggles shaping Colorado and the West. Finley grew up in Colorado, graduated from Stanford, then earned masters degrees in international relations as a Fulbright scholar in Britain and in journalism at Northwestern. He is also a lawyer and previously handled international news with on-site reporting in 40 countries.

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